


Luck beyond the Pale

by EgregiousDerp



Category: Rogue One: A Star Wars Story (2016)
Genre: All Is As The Force Wills It, Background sexy things in here, Baze has feelings, Canon Compliant, Chirrut is a little shit, I can't believe I wrote this in one sitting, I'm sorry spacedads, If you care to read it that way, M/M, Magic Force Bullshit, Mild autism-coded Chirrut, You fight like an old Chinese Couple, he smiles and gets away with everything, just because I couldn't talk to people, not saying they're married but..., pretty much married
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-12-18
Updated: 2016-12-18
Packaged: 2018-09-09 12:31:29
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,218
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8890789
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/EgregiousDerp/pseuds/EgregiousDerp
Summary: When he sees him for the first time, after the beach, Chirrut is still grinning, beatific, pale blue fingers outstretched to a colony of small, horned children, offering to tell them their futures in exchange for valuables he can no longer collect, scattering Koans about the Force like pennies into a bowl.





	

**Author's Note:**

> This work contains MAJOR SPOILERS for Rogue One and also approximately One Quarter of my net feeling quota for the rest of the year.
> 
> (I keep reading this and finding typos and cringing. Sorry. They should be fixed by now.)

When he sees him the first time after the beach, Chirrut is grinning, beatific, pale blue fingers outstretched towards a colony of small, horned children with tattooed faces, offering to tell them their futures in exchange for valuables he cannot in fact collect, scattering koans about the Force like pennies into a bowl.

 _Old habits_ , Baze thinks, like the sensation of warmth filling the chest he does not in fact have any longer.

Chirrut straightens mid-syllable, turning his eyes to him. Still blank. Milky, like twin moons.

The children fade, or, perhaps, it is they who fade, into the cosmic background, Chirrut's eyes perhaps two very real moons somewhere. The red of the scarf about his legs the dragging hem of some nebula somewhere, ready to flash with movement. Life.

Perhaps they are constellations, supernovae when he runs to him, when Baze embraces him hard enough that his feet leave the ground. Chirrut feels real in his arms, solid and somehow more than solid. Flowing through him.

"You old _fool_." Chirrut chides, heatless, breathless in his ear. Words almost imputed rather than spoken. Slightly petulant and flattened tones, the air of teasing all Chirrut's, as familiar to Baze as the wind in the holy city. The sounds of its people.

He wonders if it too lives on here. A ghostly city filled with ghostly, luminous beings, or if it was cursed to oblivion the moment the Empire began pulling away its sacred stones, toppling its statues for target practice, if they are all that remains.

Chirrut is not warm in his arms as he once was. His hands don't trace at the textures of him as they once did, so that Baze half wonders if he can see, if perhaps that too is a thing done and gone, resigned to their living days, like the sound of water, and of Chirrut furiously cleansing himself, re-consecrating his body every time they lapsed and gave in to intimacy despite the lapsed monk’s laughing admonitions.

  
_We are not of this crude matter, we are spirit, my friend. We are for higher things._

  
_We_ are _the force_.

And he hadn't believed him, had scoffed and pulled the laughing monk beneath him, nibbling his ear until he squirmed, gave in, with the stifling heat pouring in off the open windows set in the thick mud walls. Holy and profane all at once.

He thinks of the city, and he thinks of Chirrut's lost warmth, of shaving his face tenderly for him in the morning light while Chirrut sat naked before him, legs folded beneath him, the touch of fabric apparently too much combined with the scrape of the razor. Sensitivity of the force, or maybe just sensitivity of Chirrut.

He thinks of the flash of his motion, and the sweetness of his breath beside him, pinning him with his arms behind his back, teasing in his ear. _I could have killed you in your sleep_.

  
_Perhaps. Perhaps not,_ Baze replied some days. Or _Yes, but your aim is terrible._ Or Yes,  
_but soon your mouth will be rinsed and your breath won’t be half as bad._

Before one day he'd flipped him over and pinned him instead, intending playfulness and Chirrut had instead looked almost hurt, and hadn't locked his arms behind him and offered to murder him ever again.

...All these, perhaps irreparably lost things, now irrelevant as the other man, the real force of Chirrut pulls away, leaving Baze wondering why he is here.

He is no believer in the force like Chirrut.

He doesn't deserve this, he thinks.

(But he longed for it, he thinks, with all his being, praying with a single, blind thought, a desperation, _It probably was all for nothing._ And after, with a great surge of emotion that had almost turned to a sob, _Let me go where Chirrut is. Let me go to Chirrut. Chirrut_.)

"You know you did not have to go _everywhere_ I have. I _was_ with you."

Even in death, Chirrut sounds petulant, more disgruntled than he is. He always got away with it when he was living, allowed more, given more leeway because of the pitiable state of his eyes. And he'd taken every inch he was ever given, and more. He'd made people regret the condescension of their charity or their cruelty more than once.

Baze has never known any such man--holy and pious one second, and irreverent and cheerfully swindling the next.

"You didn't have to come so quickly," Chirrut barks, louder, and more sternly than he really means.

Baze thinks of the body in the sand, sightless and still.

And he _is_ armored, even in the afterlife, if that is what this is. The restlessness and longing...

_I'm one with the force and the force is in me._

"I know your luck. So I came swiftly," Baze says.

He is armored. Perhaps there is reason, or perhaps that is who he is.

And Chirrut grins.

That grin that could light up a system and spread warmth over planets.

There was a time when Chirrut knew every chink in his armor by his fingers alone, could peel him from it like a steamed sand prawn in seconds, could push him into the pillows of their shared pallet with two fingertips and a smile, and Baze would fall, trusting Chirrut would follow shortly after, crawling down over him, touching him with his lips and fingertips even though he'd scour his skin almost raw when they were done. Guilty, perhaps.

"You worry. And this is why you are dead so young. I told you this when we lived.”

Chirrut is merciless in his hiding, staring at him balefully with his sightless eyes.

"You _make_ me worry," Baze scoffs, heatless, as easy and companionable as his hands around Chirrut's forearms. Delicate. Deceptively strong. He thinks of many times in their youth, of Chirrut's blithe fearlessness, and disregard for anything but his instinct and feeling.

And Chirrut grins again.

"I cannot know I have your attention otherwise."

"You always have it," Baze chides, voice softer than he means it to be. Touch softer, though Chirrut is far from delicate.

He'd watched Chirrut get kicked out of the monastery without a decicred to his name and pull himself back to his feet laughing in the faces of his masters without a care.

Not delicate. Merely precious.

  
He'd never had to tell him he loved him because Chirrut had already known, had pulled him down to him by the tangles of his hair and kissed him like he was still ordained, and matter-of-factly bestowing a benediction, some bit of force wizardry that had tangled his soul up with the reckless monk's so he'd never get free.

Baze had carried him, roaring drunk and laughing, out of bars he'd thrown into utter anarchy for the sheer, senseless ungodly _joy_ of it.

He wouldn't have known _how_ to live without Chirrut.

No one knew how to live as Chirrut Imwe did.

Bodhi had called them Rogues.

Chirrut certainly was.

Had been.

 _Is,_ perhaps.

  
He had taken anything he’d ever wanted from Baze. And Baze had only wanted him to continue.

  
He’d _loved_ him.

  
He thinks, in his own easy, flighty, unthinking way, Chirrut had loved him, too.

"Look how you dressed me today," Chirrut scoffs, holding up a flickering blue hem and tossing his head, "I don't like it."

"Why? Can you see it now?" Baze asks, genuinely startled by the thought.

Chirrut scoffs.

"Yes. My eyes are _magic ghost eyes_ and I can see all. I see colors, and the force, and into souls now- NO, you fool, I can't see it! I just _know_ it. This is a terrible color."

His accent has crept into his basic again, blurring the words together. _Terribah colahh._

And Baze almost smiles because this is a man who had hated the color red purely on _principle_ and to be exceptionally contrary the moment Baze had formulated an opinion, just to see what he'd do about it.

(What he'd done had been to buy the scarlet scarf about Chirrut's waist with his own work, his own hands, his blood money, flashing in his eye when Chirrut moved, signaling his motion the same way he'd put the light on his staff so he could find him in dark places even if it did Chirrut no good himself.

What he’d _done_ was he’d made love to him later on a spill of scarlet cloth and Chirrut had covered his ears with both hands and had bitten his shoulder so hard he'd bled--as though he'd known what he’d done and could tell he was lying on red, could tell the way it added something to his pale skin and fine cap of dark hair and was determined to resent it.)

"Well," Baze settles heavily even as a ghost, sighing, eyes working over the pale shade of him, the blue-glowing washing out of everything that had made Chirrut lively, and comely, "We may both have to suffer."

"Yes, but YOU will suffer more." Chirrut intones, striking the ground with his stick for emphasis, "I will tell you every day for a thousand years."

"I look forward to it," Baze replies, hearing the warmth in his voice, and knowing Chirrut has too by the flash of his grin.

"And my _feet_ are cold," Chirrut continues to complain, through his smile.

"What, your magic ghost feet?" Baze snorts.

"Yes! My magic. Ghost. Feet. And I blame YOU." He jabs a finger into Baze's armored chest.

"Oh."

"What is this OH? _No._ " Another petulant _whack_ of the stick against the ground, "You come here, and you warm them," Chirrut demands.

"For a thousand years?"

"YES. For a thousand years, Baze Malbus, Cause of my Aching Feet."

  
And Baze is smiling despite himself, thinking sadly of home, of their little apartment, their screaming, grovelling, unreasonable neighbors who came and went, and how much he would have loved to be there now, kissing the high, haughty insteps of Chirrut’s feet, listening to him complain a little too-loudly.

  
_And we would be dead along with the rest of the city._

  
Another bitter thought:

  
_Which bought you what, two days? You_ are _dead. And Chirrut-_

  
"I suppose you'll have me carry you the next time you appear to a band of children to swindle them out of their candies and baubles," Baze replies even as he's undoing Chirrut's shoes, "It'll be up to me to tell them 'this is no Jedi. He's nothing but a ghost of an old fool with bad feet.'"

Chirrut snorted, waving his hand, gesticulating with his stick.

"And I will be forced to say 'Pay no attention to him. He is cranky and filthy, and kisses like a bantha.'"

Baze pretends to be offended to fight down his scoff of laughter. The warmth in him that is perhaps the lift of a star, a blossoming branch, a flutter of life some place in the universe that they are part of.

"It's _you_ who kissed this old bantha."

Many times, over many years.

"I did not say I disliked Bantha," Chirrut replies so primly Baze chuckles aloud, "They are imbued with many noble qualities."

"Really."

"Sometimes."

Chirrut's fingers tighten in his hair, leaning against his shoulder.

"...I would have had you live," he says softly, the remorse in his voice catching Baze off-guard so he looks up. Guilt is a rare thing on Chirrut's face. It darkens and clouds it now, "A long and prosperous life, my old and filthy Bantha."

Baze shakes his head, reaching up to cup Chirrut's face in his hands, to press their foreheads together.

He thinks of the bad days, of Chirrut huddled alone, behind the curtains, on the ground, hands outstretched before him, stuttering his mantra over and over and over again like it could keep the darkness at bay. Chirrut knocking and gesturing, sucking in breaths like they could bring luck, or peace, or perhaps just some shred of control, pottery shattered about him. The sense that to be sensitive to the force was not always a good thing. Their Dug landlady hissing and making warding gestures with her scrunched in hands, and speaking of _The Demon._

There was no demon. There was only Chirrut. _His_ Chirrut, pushing back the darkness, fighting an unseen battle, listening as he completed his mantra for him, muttering it in his right ear as it had to be muttered, rocking them both.

  
_I am one with the force and the force is with me. I am one with the force and the force is with me._

Until Chirrut relaxed and ceased, humming with him, leaning into him like he could ground him there as long as he could feel as much of him as possible behind and around him, relaxing.

"I know," Baze says, "I also know how you get when you're alone," Baze adds quietly, touching Chirrut's face.

"I was not alone," Chirrut says, solemnly, the break of his smile slow and sweet in the way that had pushed the breath out of him when they'd been living, when he'd known for a fact the little glitter of manipulation under the sweetness of Chirrut's face, and the delight that had meant nothing by it, and still, _and still-_

"I had _you._ "

**Author's Note:**

> I like to imagine Chirrut is there yelling at Yoda in the background for the rest of the movies in the key of "Oh good. Now if the empire finds him he can throw rocks." And "ARE YOU KIDDING ME? I DIDN'T DIE FOR THIS," while Baze looks on patiently in the background like "I died because you died for this."
> 
> He introduces himself to Luke three years later by force dropping a book on his foot and Luke drops his hot chocolate.
> 
> (Come bother me on tumblr for this and other quality crack~  
> It's EgregiousDerp there, too.)


End file.
